A walk in the woods

My gentlemen's book club is reading a novel by Daniel Mason, entitled North Woods. I described it to a friend by comparing it to one of my favorite stories by Annie Proulx, Accordion Crimes. That may not mean anything to some readers of this post, so I'll summarize it by saying that both books share a dark--though not sinister-account of the lives of successive owners of a grief laden object. In the case of North Woods, it is a New England home, a humble cabin in the colonial period that like so many older homes with which I am familiar, has suffered successive additions and transformations over the centuries.

I lived in one such home many years ago in New Hampshire--a typical two-story saltbox farmhouse on a dirt post road that once ran all the way to Dartmouth College. In the attic of the main structure hand adzed beams and purlins revealed its age and told a story about its origins. Old structures, houses, barns and outbuildings have a certain mystery about them. Even more so, abandoned foundations and home sites. Walking in the woods anywhere in New England chances the possibility of coming upon these sites. Unless your eye is trained for it you might not spot such locations, far from any obvious path or byway. If ever you spot lilac bushes set apart from one another in a line, you are most likely viewing what was once the doorway of a house that those bushes framed.

Field stones, however haphazard they may be aligned in a rough geometry are another giveaway that at one time a structure stood on the spot. Having spent countless hours tramping through the woods, those telltales always inspire in me thoughts of what once occupied these spaces, the lives that once carried on in and around them. They are particularly poignant when they stand alone, never a part of a town or settlement, but aloof from the places where other humans dwelt. What brought people to live there, to work, farm or choose a life of alienation? Many times there are no apparent fields nearby nor the kind of forest land that betrays a former pasture. In other cases one can trace a path of destruction, fire or in New England, commonly, the great storm of 1938. The hulks of gigantic old growth trees all aligned along an axis of the hurricane's path reveal the deadliest storm New England ever experienced.

Where those enormous oaks, elms and maples once stood there are today birch, pine and scrub, pulpwood trees that sprang up in the newly revealed space where a dense green canopy once crowded them out. In other spots almost inexplicably, giant white pines eighty and 100 feet in height still stand huddled together where nature and man have not inveighed. These are sacred grounds--hushed by the dense forest, far from any logging road and under benign protection for now. Somehow they evaded the axe and the saw, were spared a life as masts on sailing ships or telephone poles and pilings and allowed to grow to maturity towering above the matt of pine needles and leaf detritus that quiet the forest floor.

A walk in the woods is a story, the narrative existing solely in the imagination of the viewer, the characters conjured up out of the mood of the day, and perhaps some local history. It need not be in New England, there are stories wherever one walks if you have the eyes to see them. Today would be a good day to take a walk and write one yourself.